


when by now (and tree by leaf)

by proser132



Category: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: I'm so sorry, Multi, Other characters and pairings to be added, Prompt Fic, Sweet, also desperately unlikely to be canon compliant post-phase-1, but honestly, headcanons ahoy, here be stories, some of these are very short, some of these are way too long, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-04 21:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4153395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proser132/pseuds/proser132
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, in the tumult and riptide of a life spent as superheroes, they all managed to be happy, to be healthy.</p>
<p>(scenes and whatifs of the Avengers universe where everything turned out okay)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i would paint a reverie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EatTheRudeOnes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EatTheRudeOnes/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surveying an aftermath (and which one is this, there's been so many, Steve can't recall -)

"Aren't sunrises a little cliche?"

Steve blinked hard, eyes watering from being open so long, and looked over his shoulder at Tony. The other man lounged against the glass door of the penthouse, huddled over his cup of steaming coffee, and Steve could see that he'd been awake for little more than a half hour at most.

"It's sunset, actually," Steve corrected, for the pleasure of watching Tony's face twist in confusion.

"Bullshit it is, Rogers," Tony huffed, and took a long pull of his coffee with the air of a starving man offered bread. "Jarvis, give me the time."

"It is the twelfth of October, sir," Jarvis said crisply, voice a little lost in the constant wind of the roof. "6:47 -"

"Ha, fuckin' told you -"

"- PM."

Steve laughed aloud at Tony's disgruntled face, and turned his back to the sun. "I'm not surprised, Stark, you were awake for a few days."

"Situation normal," Tony replied blithely, and swallowed more coffee.

"All fucked up?" Steve finished, and Tony choked. After a minute of spluttering, during which Steve kept a straight face through sheer force of will, he was rewarded with the bleary sort of glare that only a twenty-hour nap could produce.

"I am never going to get used to that," Tony said morosely, and Steve broke into chuckles at last. "Still, sunsets are cliche, too," Tony added. "What are you up to, out here?"

"Good view," Steve admitted. "Picking out an angle to do a cityscape from, but I'm not finding what I'm looking for out here."

Tony looked at him, still bleary, but shuffled over and stood beside him, peering out over the city. Steve kept half an eye on Tony, and so wasn't surprised by his loud snort a few seconds later.

"Yeah, city's looking pretty rough around the edges, isn't it," Tony said, voice somehow steady and exhausted at the same time. "Remind me to fly you to Paris, or Vienna - somewhere worth drawing, yeah?"

Steve watched the sunset's red-gold light play over Tony's face, a fainter, warmer armour, and thought that he probably didn't have to go as far as Tony was thinking. "Sounds swell, Stark," he said instead, and made a mental note to buy finer paints. He'd need them for the painting he had in mind.


	2. the moral fibres

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because things go missing, doesn't mean they're lost.

Bruce tried to set his mind to his task, carefully measuring out exactly twelve micrograms of iron oxide III, the tiny granules a dull desert red beneath the lens of his microscope. The forceps trembled violently in his hand, scattering his hard work. He set them aside with a sigh.

It was no use; he couldn't focus.

The lab was, on its kindest days, dryly cool. By design, of course. Many of the chemicals Bruce came across in the course of Avengering were ridiculously volatile - the tiny thermite charges he was assembling were quite stable, but the room was kept at a steady forty degrees to prevent reaching the boiling point of his more delicate solutions. He already disliked keeping such a large stock of acetyldehyde on hand without running the risk of cancer.

His mouth cramped up into a self-deprecating smile. If the _gamma_ hadn't riddled him with tumours...

But, regardless. Today was not one of the lab's kind days, and the chill, so welcome in August, was significantly less so in February. And his favourite sweater, the pale peach and grey jumper he'd traded bread and fruit for on the side of a Peruvian road, had disappeared.

It was the only thing he trusted to keep out the chill. The thick alpaca wool was sturdy against any intrusions, tightly woven, and he had no idea where the hell it had gotten to. He was in the process of an internal debate re: finishing these charges for Tony so that they could finish their joint present on time versus finding his second favourite sweater, when there was a knock on the door.

Deciding the sweater was necessary for his continued sanity, he began tidying up the spilled iron oxide III as he threw a "Come in!" over his shoulder.

"Evening, doc," came Clint's cheerful answer, and Bruce was torn between the need to smile brightly and the equally strong pull to curse.

Clint had been off on some super-secret spy mission for the past week, which was well timed, as his birthday was tomorrow. He'd been due to return tomorrow morning, and the rest of the Avengers had planned to surprise him when he'd returned. But now he was back early, and Bruce wasn't sure what to do with their plans now in the air.

"Clint," Bruce said warmly, sweeping up the last of the dust. To hell with it. "Glad to have you ba-" He turned and froze.

"You okay there, buddy?" Clint asked, face falling from cheerful to concerned, but Bruce was paying very little attention to his face.

"You stole my sweater?"

Clint squirmed a bit, but the cheer was back on his face, with no accompanying hint of shame. "I didn't steal it. I borrowed it." He paused, and his face grew contemplative. "Probably for a long time."

Bruce just stared. "What?" Clint asked, beginning to look a little defensive. "It's a nice sweater."

"I know it's a nice sweater," Bruce said flatly. "Because it's my sweater."

"Nah," Clint said, the defensiveness abandoned for a childish spark of mischief. "It's still a nice sweater now that it's mine. Pretty sure its niceness isn't because it's yours."

"Clint Barton -"

"Thank god you don't know my middle name, you'd sound like my grandmother -"

"- give me back my sweater -"

"- which would be just, god, terrible, I don't think I could manage to live with Stark and a dangerous version of my grandmother at the same time, well, more dangerous, thank god she's dead and can't hear me say that -"

"- immediately!" Bruce finally managed to cut through.

"Well, if you insist," Clint said brightly, and pulled it over his head. He tossed it over and then yelped as the cold air hit his skin. "Sweater, no," he whined, his skin goosebumping as he wrapped his arms around himself.

"No less than you deserve," Bruce said as he pulled the sweater on, and sighed happily at how warm it was already.

"Can I sue for joint custody?" Clint demanded, and his teeth chattered a little on the j.

"You kidnapped it, no court of law will entertain your claim," Bruce pointed out, but took pity on his friend and pushed him gently out of the lab into the warmer air of the hall. "Who else knows you're back?"

"Probably Tash," Clint said, still shivering.

"Probably?" Bruce repeated, ushering them into the elevator, and he tucked the warmth that Clint had come to him first away, under the warmth of his sweater.

"She's gonna kill me, I know," Clint said, still shivering, "but -"

The elevator opened to admit an (admittedly furious) Natasha, which neatly cut off whatever Clint was going to say. Bruce didn't mind, though.

He tangled his fingers in the sleeves of his sweater come home, and thought in a quiet way, _some things take time to say._


	3. and made better by

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Natasha gives of herself has left more of her than she thought she had.

The gifts Natasha gives out are strange ones, but she gives them, and very few people expect them.

"You just don't seem the presents type," Maria Hill admitted that first Christmas, her aloof expression marred by her wide eyes. "Not that - I don't mean to imply -"

Natasha knew what she meant to imply. The small silver-wrapped boxes on Coulson's desk and Barton's locker were just as unexpected, and met with discreet caution; she did not blame them. The sounds of lives ended still echoed in her head sometimes, shouts and words met trained responses and trigger thoughts. At morning's first light, when it was finally bright enough to sleep, she mourned that her body might finally be free, but had left her mind behind.

But even if Hill couldn't remember that night four months ago, the four stupid (brave) agents, the cruel (true) things they spat, the broken bones (the empty mind) the lives (she added them to her ledger in her mind, even though they still breathed, they may never go into the field again and it's my fault my fault my fault) she had saved, then Natasha would remember for her.

Hill's face grew no less bewildered when she lifted the tiny statuette of Pallas Athene, a pale plaster companion to Coulson's Erinyes Adrasteia and Barton's masked Artemis Alphaea. Natasha smiled, and said not one word.

* * *

It was years before she gave someone other than Coulson, Barton, or Hill a gift.

It wasn't that she didn't give gifts at all; each holiday found small packages on their desks or in their lockers. Tiny handblown glass hummingbirds for one Pascha, and warm throw blankets for Candlemas. The dates of her holidays often didn't coincide with theirs, and changed every year.

Their confusion was delightful, and when they figured it out (and marked their calendars accordingly), it became...

Delight was too weak a word, and the feeling that sang in Natasha's bones whenever she saw Coulson's nearly printed 'Pentecost' appear precisely fifty days after Pascha, no matter the changing days and times, went unnamed.

So when Steve Rogers gingerly lifted a box out of his locker two months after New York, and Clint sucked in a loud breath of surprise, and the unnamed feeling swelled as Steve unearthed a book of French poetry, Natasha smiled.

When Rogers asked how she'd known he spoke French, she didn't even roll her eyes.

* * *

Some gifts she gave didn't look like gifts at first.

Stark watched her apprehensively as she marched into his workshop, manila folder cutting into her palm, she held it so tight.

"Uh, not to complain about the sudden hot chick materialising right when I usually hit the delusion stage of sleep deprivation," he said, sounding lucid anyway, "but can I get a name? Because otherwise I'm going to have to activate security protocols, and believe me, you won't like my security protocols."

Natasha remembered that her hair is currently blond and her eyes blue, because she'd just left a mission and hadn't had time to even pop out her contacts before rushing here.

"It's me, Stark."

"Oh, fuck!" He yelped, toppling backwards onto the bench behind him and sending bits and pieces everywhere. "Oh, my god, Romanoff, of fucking course it's you, jesus, can we pretend I didn't just hit on slash threaten you, because I am way too busy to die now -"

"Shut up," she said calmly, because that was how you handled Tony Stark, calmly and as straightforward as possible.

His teeth clicked audibly as he shut his mouth.

"Got something for you," she said, and held out the folder.

Stark took it, still carefully following the 'shut up' command, and skimmed through the first few pages before what he was reading caught up to him.

He looked up, and said, "Uh, don't take this the wrong way, but is there a reason that I'm holding your mission report? Because right now it kind of looks like you managed to break that FOX news anchor's face, the one that was a dick two weeks ago, and I've gotta ask if SHIELD is literally sending out hits on assholes, because I'm not gonna lie, that kind of makes me public enemy number one."

Natasha feels her face break out in a grin, and after a moment, Stark gives her one back.

"His producer was selling WitSec secrets by violating journalists' confidentiality agreements, some of which are under SHIELD jurisdiction," she said airily, and turned to go. "He just happened to walk in at the wrong moment."

Stark was laughing when she left the room, already preparing herself to face her new handler, and thinking that if he'd been around to see it, Phil would have laughed, too.

* * *

Thor was just wonderful to give gifts to. He was fascinated by Earth and everything in it, and whenever Natasha found something strange in her travels, she'd bring it back to show him, and spend hours explaining it if she knew what it was and hours finding out if she didn't.

Thor was easy in the best possible way, and Natasha honoured him for it.

* * *

Bruce was tricky. He'd been almost as many places as she had, and for a while, she hadn't been sure what a good gift for him _was_.

One day, she brought him a package of seeds - wildflowers, from India - and his face had gone soft in a way that Natasha hadn't seen since she had been a child.

Bruce was tricky, but good at keeping secrets, like the fact that she had cried at the way he said thank you. He never mentioned it, but the garden he ended up keeping in his rooms kept growing, with plants from as many places as Natasha could find. It was a silent gift, but it rang loud as Palm Sunday bells in her heart.

* * *

The gift Natasha Romanoff gave Phil Coulson two years after she thought he'd died was a hard punch to the arm. It was a joint gift from her and Clint; the 'gift' part came from the fact that it wasn't to the face.

* * *

The gifts Natasha gives out are true ones. True as the heart behind them, the heart she's worked so hard to fix.

True as the family she gifts them to.


End file.
